A $1.4 billion anti-drug advertising campaign conducted by the U.S. government since 1998 does not appear to have helped reduce drug use and instead might have convinced some youths that taking illegal drugs is normal, the Government Accountability Office says.

’Thank goodness the Obscene Publications Squad has gone,’ sighed a fraught Mr Justice Mars-Jones in 1976 as he sent down Detective Chief Inspector George Fenwick and four of his colleagues for taking bribes from Soho pornographers. ‘I fear the damage you have done may be with us for a long time.’

A photograph of President Bush waving a flag after the Sept. 11 attacks is juxtaposed against a black-and-white image of an African American mother smoking crack cocaine in bed next to her baby. Larger-than-life portraits of Osama bin Laden and Pablo Escobar line the walls. The central message of a traveling Drug Enforcement Administration exhibit unveiled at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry yesterday is that terrorism and drugs are inextricably linked.

Epilepsy sufferer Michael Rourke is demanding the right to use the drug that he says cures his violent seizures. Police raided the Brockworth home of the 37-year-old last month, confiscating the cannabis plants he says are vital in averting his fits.

American culture has closed up around John Sinclair. There’s just not enough freedom in it any more – not enough free time, not enough outrage, not enough difference between one place and the next, not enough high culture or genuine bohemia, not enough Sun Ra or Dylan.

Winston Churchill is commonly credited with having said, “Democracy means that when there’s a knock in the door at 3 am, it’s probably the milkman.” One wonders what Churchill would make of modern-day, drug war America.

Prosecutors are taking a firm line on the supply of cannabis for pain relief to people with chronically painful conditions such as multiple sclerosis, despite the downgrading of the drug from class B to class C.

In 1996, California legalized cannabis as a treatment for “any… condition for which marijuana brings relief.” Although the law does not constrain physicians from approving the use of cannabis by children and adolescents, the state medical board has investigated physicians for doing so, exerting a profoundly inhibiting effect.